This is great. Some people think the goal of meditation is to maintain focus on one thing without getting distracted. It’s common, then, for a meditation practice to feel frustrating and discouraging; yet another activity for them to fail because they can’t stay focused. It might help to think of meditation as “practice of returning.” Through this lens we assume that we WILL get distracted, and once we notice we’ve gotten distracted, we practice returning to our breath/blank space, etc.

Thanks for writing this. I had zero idea what EVs mean for a mechanic.

Ah, another interesting book I can recommend is called Crazy Like Us, about the globalization of the Western concept of mental health. They talk about execs at GlaxoSmithKline trying to figure out how to market antidepressants in Japan. In Japanese culture sadness and depression were seen as a normal part of the human experience. Like you said, the pharma guys had to get clever to convince their Japanese market that depression is an illness, and they had the treatment.

I mostly disagree that diagnoses are helpful to therapists. Or rather, most diagnoses are not helpful to me. I can look at them as shorthand, so if a client has MDD in their chart I have a broad sense of some of the symptoms they’re experiencing. But I can just as easily, you know, ask the client what’s going on. There are a small few (ASD, bipolar, schizophrenia, OCD) whose symptoms are so discrete and disruptive that specialized treatment can be life-changing. Outside of those few, if insurance didn’t require it, I would never assign a diagnosis again.

I’m a licensed mental health professional but I don’t specialize in ADHD. I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD and take stimulants every day.

ADHD is mostly genetic, but IMO the increase in diagnoses is partly due to the information overload from the digital age we’re living in. There are simply more things distracting us, more cognitive demands, such that even “normal” brains will struggle to keep up.

I want to point out, too, that the DSM has serious issues with validity and reliability. Some of the criteria are so subjective as to be useless, and two providers diagnosing the same person can arrive at very different disorders. Allen Frances, chair of the DSM-IV (we’re on DSM-5 now) wrote a book called Saving Normal where he criticizes the APA’s trend of pathologizing basic human experiences. With each DSM edition the diagnostic criteria get more broad, to the point that I can argue that any given person meets criteria for SOME disorder. If everyone is disordered, then what’s normal anymore? How is that helpful?

Most of the diagnostic criteria for ADHD describe someone who isn’t a “good student” or a “good employee.” It doesn’t consider context. If someone fucking hates their job, I’m not surprised they struggle to complete tasks that require sustained mental effort. Kids are reminded every day that the world is burning, so of course they’re distracted from their math homework. I’m not saying people aren’t suffering from what we call ADHD, I’m saying that it’s a normal human response to the state of the world right now, so why are we calling it a disorder?

Edit: a word

They have a handful of dumb screens, like you’re describing, at Best Buy. Somehow they’re thousands of dollars for a normal sized TV.

I’m sure there are folks here who have listened to a lot more Sam Harris than I have, but I’ve listened to several audiobooks and probably 40-50 hours of his podcast. He has some smart things to say about neuroscience and mindfulness, but my god he has some toxic, middle-school-ass takes on Islam. I haven’t heard that quote before, but I’m not surprised he said it. He’s Ben Shapiro with a PhD who makes deliberately obtuse, reductive, bad faith statements about Islam and Muslims.

For the record, I’m a white atheist. I think religion has been the source of immeasurable violence in the world. I don’t think anyone should be shot over something they say or draw, but to declare “end of moral analysis” is ignorant.

Frozen grapes. Once they’ve been out of the freezer for a couple minutes, they thaw into little slushie bubbles.

Popsicle brand makes sugar free tropical flavored, and they’re delicious.

You can chill. The person who replied to you wasn’t arguing against your general point, just clarifying the context.

I think this is a little prescriptive. There might be some truth in this but everyone needs to find acceptance on their own. Sometimes running works just fine.

Galaxy Buds are just so solid. The little spendy goblin in me has looked at new ear buds for years, and I even got some free Pixel Buds with my last phone, but I keep going back to the galaxies.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems more realistic to say:

1. Playing the same game twice is unlikely because of the number of possible games, OR
2. It’s possible the same game has never been played twice, OR
3. After a certain number of moves, it’s very possible to create a never-played game

I’m certain I’ve played the same game multiple times, because I suck at chess and I fall into the same obvious traps over and over.

I agree that it’s a beautiful love story in a vacuum, but in the context of a larger society I think Nick Offerman’s character was a psychopath. With so many people suffering around him, he chose to hoard weapons and resources, and set up booby traps to avoid having to share with anyone. That’s essentially what the ultra-rich are doing today in response to the climate crisis, and nobody is romanticizing it.

Succession has some of the best screenwriting of any TV show or movie, IMO. S3E08 “Chiantishire” stands out to me. So much of the dialogue is passive-aggressive or euphemistic. S4E09 “Church and State” is also an absolute marvel, with the main scene being shot with 8 cameras simultaneously, and showing some of the most powerful performances in the series.

Oh this is so helpful. Thank you.

So I got a flash drive to install Windows and (attempt) to install COD, but I have a Mac computer. To move anything to the flash drive, I had to format for MacOS, but to move anything to the deck I had to format for Linux. Am I misunderstanding something?

The last time I was a passenger in my brother’s car, I remembered that he tends to drive in a way that makes me feel unsafe, like what OP described. Unreasonable acceleration, tailgating, swerving. He laughed when I was physically bracing myself and said his partner does the same thing. I told him I just won’t be in a car when he’s driving anymore. Of course, it’s easier to do because I don’t see him too often.

IMO when I’m driving, I not only have a responsibility to keep my passengers safe, but to make them feel safe. I might feel safe because I know I’ll brake in time, but my passengers don’t because they’re not controlling the vehicle.

Do you have EDS?

I’ve had a $60 Ryobi drill for 10+ years. The battery and the drill work just fine. For basic maintenance, I would rate a cordless drill in my top 5 tools - up there with a hammer and tape measure.

Just to review, your arguments that I’m labeling as non-evidence-based are:

1. LSD is stored in body fat
2. LSD can be released after the initial trip is over
3. When the LSD is released it can trigger a “flashback” during which the person is “tripping-out”
4. Because of this risk, anyone who has used LSD should be banned from operating a vehicle

You chose to quote an abstract from a 40-year-old lit review, and even though it doesn’t support your point, you’re declaring this “case closed.” You’re either arguing in bad faith or you’re not putting much effort into finding the truth. Either way I think you know your case is weak.

“Delayed, intermittent phenomena (“flashbacks”) and LSD-precipitated functional disorders that usually respond to treatment appropriate for the non-psychedelic-precipitated illnesses they resemble, round out this temporal means of classification.”

Strassman is summarizing the range of post-LSD experiences that have been reported. Delayed, intermittent psychosis is at one end of the range and mild, short-term symptoms at the other. He doesn’t validate those reports, and goes on to say that no causal relationship had been established, and the etiology of “flashbacks” was at that time controversial.

A more recent 2021 review by David Nutt et al. (Nutt is by most accounts the most credentialed and respected psychedelic researcher today) says:

A common perception linked to psychedelics is that they induce ‘flashbacks’ of the drug experience long after its acute effects have subsided. Although transient drug-free visual experiences resembling the effects of hallucinogens have been documented in psychedelic users (e.g. 40–60% of users; Baggott et al., 2011; Carhart-Harris and Nutt, 2010), they are not hallucinogen-specific, as they can also be caused by other psychoactive substances, for example, alcohol or benzodiazepines (Holland and Passie, 2011), and can occur in healthy populations (Halpern et al., 2016). In most cases, these side effects are mild and diminish in duration, intensity and frequency with time (Strassman, 1984).

If these symptoms are prolonged and distressing, the syndrome is known as HPPD. The DSM-V (American Psychiatric Association (APA), 2013) reports a prevalence rate for HPPD as 4.2% in hallucinogen users (Baggott et al., 2011) based on a single online questionnaire. Other studies have documented much lower prevalence rates of the disorder, some as low as 1/50,000 (Grinspoon and Bakalar, 1979). Furthermore, if approximately 1/25 users experience HPPD as suggested by Baggott et al. (2011), then it would be a near statistical certainty that some participants in the current era of psychedelic research, which has collectively included thousands of participants in trials since 2000 (Carhart-Harris et al., 2021; Ross et al., 2016), would have experienced HPPD by now; however, this has not been the case.

However, the emergence of large online fora dedicated to the discussion of HPPD on websites, such as Reddit (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/HPPD/, which has > 7000 members), suggests that cases can be identified at the population level, even if the prevalence is too low to be captured in clinical trials that typically use small sample sizes. While the large-scale data collection of online fora is helpful to gain insights into wider populations, samples are self-selected and likely to be biased, limiting the conclusions that can be drawn.

The incidence of HPPD appears to be much lower in the clinical context, perhaps as a result of efficient screening and preparation (Cohen, 1960; Johnson et al., 2008). Although Halpern and Pope (2003) suggest that there may be no identifiable risk factors for HPPD, a subsequent study of 19 individuals who developed HPPD found that all recalled anxiety and/or panic reactions during the triggering episode (Halpern et al., 2016). Thus, HPPD symptoms could potentially be conceived as a form of trauma response, similar to PTSD, or a form of health anxiety evoked by residual symptoms of the original experience.

I will say again that your original arguments are not supported by current research. I won’t spend any more time debating this with you because we don’t seem to have the same definitions of “evidence” and “misinformation.”